made in the image and form of God, without explaining his meaning more particularly. Hence interpreters differ in attempting to define it. The language need not be restricted either to man's spirit or to his body, but may refer to his united whole, including spiritual qualities and bodily form. The ancient Hebrew did not think of God without a certain form, but transferred the human one to him, divesting it of grossness, and giving it an ethereal luminousness of surpassing glory. The image of God, therefore, in which Adam is said to have been created, includes the whole man, with special reference to the spiritual nature within him. We cannot tell whether the writer thought of immortality as involved in the God-likeness. He may have done so. But the second account teaches that man was only mortal at first, because he is sent out of Paradise lest he should become immortal by eating of the tree of life.
The narrative in the first chapter is arranged according to a definite plan. Six days are allotted to the creation of the heavens and earth, with all their furniture animate and inanimate. After due preparation had been made by the formation of light, atmosphere, and land separated from water, life is called into existence, first vegetable, then animal, terminating in man the lord of this lower world. The narrative in chapters ii.–iv. does not present such orderly progress. In it man is the central figure, to whom all is subordinated. He is created first. For him plants and trees are made to spring up. He is placed in a delightful garden. The Lord God perceiving his solitary condition creates the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air; but when brought to the protoplast, they were insufficient to supply his mental void, so that woman was made, in whom he found a suitable partner. A number of questions connected with the first pair, not necessarily entering into the writer's main purpose in describing man's origin, but complementary and new, are, the means by which the ground yielded vegetable productions, the materials from which the man and the woman were formed, the cause of their intimate union, the place of their abode, the simplicity of their condition, and the way in which animals first received their names. By these traits preparation is made for the history of what befell the protoplasts in their primitive abode.
According to the second narrative, Jehovah planted a garden in Eden, eastward, and put the first man there. A spring or stream rising in Eden, and flowing through the garden, supplied it with water. In issuing from the garden it divided itself into four rivers, each having its own course. The writer gives their names, and the countries washed by three of them. This garden, usually termed Paradise after the Septuagint and Vulgate, has been eagerly sought for; but it has baffled curiosity. Though two of the rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris, are well known, the other two, Pison and Gihon, can only be identified with difficulty. They seem to be rivers of Northern India. The Tigris and Euphrates took their rise in the high land of Northern Armenia; the Pison, i.e., Indus, rises in the Himalayas; and the Gihon, i.e., Oxus, is connected with Ethiopia or Cush. The writer appears to have considered them all as having their source in the northern highlands of Asia, and flowing south, and there fore he placed Eden somewhere in the north of Asia. The names of two rivers belonging to a foreign tradition, and little known to the Hebrews because intercourse with India was then remote, were associated with those of two known ones incorporated in the national tradition. If the interpreter had to do with pure history, it might not be amiss to search for Eden in some definite locality; but as the case stands, the examination would probably be fruitless.
The garden has two remarkable productions—the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The former derives its name from the virtue of its fruit to impart perpetual life or immortality. The fruit of the latter communicates the knowledge of good and evil. It awakens moral consciousness. The one had to do with physical, the other with spiritual life. Such were the miraculous powers of the two trees in the midst of the garden.
The third chapter gives an account of the first pair falling away from the state in which they were created. What that state was may be clearly gathered from the words. It was one of innocent simplicity. The protoplasts had a childlike unconsciousness of evil; no knowledge of right and wrong, virtue and vice. They were in the happy condition of infancy. Their moral existence had not begun. Perfection, uprightness, righteousness, could not be predicated of them. But the world presents vice and its concomitant misery in strong colours. Misery and evil abound. The eyes of an Oriental especially must have been vividly struck with the phenomena of toilsome work, the pains of child-bearing, the slavery of woman, and the inevitable necessity of death. The Hebrews, accordingly, meditated on the cause. The writer seeks to connect with the problem, incidental phenomena, as the love of man and wife, the form of the serpent different from that of other animals, the mutual hatred of man and serpents, &c. It is an old question, the introduction of evil into the world. As all the posterity of the first pair participate in sin and suffering, the cause must be looked for in connection with these. Yet it must not proceed from themselves. God had made them innocent and happy. The origin of evil must come from without. A serpent becomes the instrument of their temptation. That cunning and mischievous animal seduces them. The writer thought of nothing but the creature itself. Those who suppose that the devil employed the serpent as his instrument, or that the devil alone is spoken of, are confronted by the fact that the idea of Satan was of later introduction among the Hebrews than the age of the writer. The curse pronounced on the tempter sufficiently shows that none but the agent expressly named was thought of.
Are these narratives of the creation, primal abode, and fall of man, literal history? So some have always believed, with Augustine and the Reformers. The difficulties in the way of this interpretation are great. As it cannot be carried out consistently, its advocates resort to various expedients. They forsake the literal for the figurative; wherever necessity demands. Thus they put a figurative construction on the language of the curse, because they allege that a literal one would be frigid, utterly unworthy of the solemn occasion, highly inconsistent with the dignity of the speaker and the condition of the parties addressed. Sometimes they even incline to regard the narrative as a sort of poem, or give it a poetical character. The atmosphere in which the accounts move is different from the literal one. Instead of assuming that God created the world and all it contains in a moment of time, and in harmonious arrangement, the first writer attributes creation to six successive days, represents the Almighty as addressing the newly-formed existences, looking upon them with satisfaction, pronouncing them good, and resting on the seventh day. He naturally chose the six days of the Hebrew week, with which he was familiar, for successive gradations of the creative power. In the second account we find a speaking serpent, God walking in a human way in the cool of the day through; the garden, his jealousy of the aspiring Adam who had attained a higher knowledge, his cursing the serpent, and cherubim with a flaming sword. To explain all this as literal history, were to attribute other perfections to the
